It All Starts From The Soul - Jorsh Peña

Meet The Who?

‘Meet the Adebanjos’ is a brand new family sitcom about a British-African family living in London. In an entertaining way it deals with how a larger than life Dad struggles to instil his traditional African values in his British household.

Therightmag met up with the creators Andrew and Debra, who told us, ‘It aims to be a feel good show which will entertain the whole family’. Brought to you by MTA Productions, ‘The Home of UK British African Comedy’, this show will fill the gap that has been left since the departure of shows like ‘Desmonds’, ‘Little Miss Jocelyn’ and ‘Goodness Gracious Me’.

Debra told us ‘It was inspired by the comedy we saw in African households, as we both like comedy and making people laugh, we didn’t want a show that was too gritty or which made people depressed about their lives, there is too much of that already out there.’

They say that if you want something done, do it yourself, who are ‘they’ you ask? Well, Andrew and Debra formed MTA Productions, backed with investment from a Media Investment Consortium with a mandate to develop and produce unique and innovate TV content. ‘Meet the Adebanjos’ is their first developed show under the consortiums mandate.

After their formation, this small team went from the drawing board to a live broadcast studio in Clapham, ‘We started development and we filmed a low budget pilot in February 2010 and then filmed and produced season 1 on a broadcast production budget, over November and December 2010 we completed 8 episodes.’ said Andrew.

It wasn’t as simple as it reads especially as Andrew admitted to us that his creative talents are limited and it was his production partner Debra that has a lot of experience in TV. ‘I unfortunately have limited TV experience.’ Originally coming on board mainly as an executive producer in relation to obtaining the finance and investment Andrew understands that, ‘Debra is the creative brains behind the operation’, he continued, ‘and I mainly look after the financial side, so we make a good team.’

Andrew agrees that protecting your creation is important, ‘I think therightcopy.co.uk is a good idea.’ However he does warn that, ‘people sometimes get caught up in trying to protect an idea rather than trying to get peoples opinion and develop it. But an idea is just an idea unless you develop it. So protect your script or idea but then don’t sit on it.’

Now the team has grown and fortunately the production company which co-produced the show with them, Fresh Media have extensive experience in making shows for BBC and SKY TV, this should ensure what we will soon see on our screens will be of the highest quality, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Andrew told us a little but stopped short at revealing team’s inspirations, ‘We aim make it as real to life as possible and use the nuisances which are generally seen in the British Nigerian community…. some of the characters are based on real life people’.